Islands have been a fixation of many countries, be it the Arab world, especially Dubai with its obsession towards building luxury property over artificial islands or China’s expansion of dominion in the South China Sea. But the African nation of Mauritius has a different kind of aspiration. The country is on the verge of creating the “Ethereum Island” within its territory.

The Ethereum Island is expected to be a collaborative partnership between the Mauritius government and private entities and ConsenSys, an Ethereum blockchain solutions provider. The island will be a global blockchain technology hub open for innovators from African and Asian nations.

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According to reports, the founder of ConsenSys Joseph Lubin accompanied by a team of executives recently visited the country, meeting representatives from the Bank of Mauritius, the country’s Board of Investment and other regional authorities. The meetings were held in the context of identifying and setting up the Ethereum Island in Mauritius.

The idea behind creating a global blockchain hub seems to be influenced by the country’s standing status as a financial hub and its aspirations to emerge as a fintech hub as well. If things go according to plans, then ConsenSys will be expanding its team by investing in human as well as working capital, with the government’s support. A publication explores the possibility of the company opening another ConsenSys Academy in Mauritius, similar to the one in Dubai.

It is worth noting that ConsenSys is already working in partnership with the Dubai government to develop blockchain solutions for both private and public sector. The Emirate is working towards implementing distributed ledger technology into government operations, by the year 2020.

Drawing information from other cryptocurrency news sources, the tech news publication quotes the head of technology, innovation, and services at the Board of Investment Mauritius, Atma Narasiah saying,

We are working to take our economy to another level, and these kinds of technologies are very important in our strategy.

The current conditions in both the camps seem to be positive at the moment, which makes the creation of Ethereum Island highly likely. The ConsenSys team has expressed satisfaction with the proceedings, and in the near future, the Asian and African blockchain developers and entrepreneurs will have a reason to rejoice.

Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract (scripting) functionality, which facilitates online contractual agreements. It provides a decentralized Turing-complete virtual machine, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which can execute scripts using an international network of public nodes.

Ethereum also provides a cryptocurrency token called "ether", which can be transferred between accounts and used to compensate participant nodes for computations performed. "Gas", an internal transaction pricing mechanism, is used to mitigate spam and allocate resources on the network.

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